Reply to Why do so many affluent people insist they have "middle class" values?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Because many of them do have middle class values.  Most of us grew up associating "middle class" with these things: graduating from college.  Getting a white collar job.  Buying a home.  Taking some sort of family vacation once or twice a year.

If your HHI is $200-$300K and you own a $1M home in North Arlington (which doesn't mean it's an impressive house), drive a "normal" car, send your kids to public school, save for college, don't have household servants except for the weekly maid service and take the kids to "normal" vacations for a week or two in the summer, that sounds pretty middle class to me.  It's just upper middle class.

I'm a single mom who makes low six figures and knows I'm probably upper middle class based on upbringing, education and where I live.  But with just one income, I'm closer to the median HHI for my county than the dual-income families I know.[/quote]

This is where the problem comes in.  I didn't grow up associating middle class with those things.  At the least, those things were upper middle class.

Saving for college, two vacations (or even one) a year, and maid service were (and always will be) for me definitely UPPER middle class.

We were middle class.  We knew we'd have to pay for college ourselves through scholarships, work, or loans.  We didn't go on yearly vacations.  Every other year, we'd make it to the beach for a few days (but that's only because we could drive to the beach).

Graduating from college is actually a pretty new middle class standard.  For my parents' generation, it wasn't expected.  Middle class jobs were jobs you could get without a college degree -- office jobs, skilled trades, et cetera.  College was a way to move into upper middle class existence or beyond.

The problem is that in changing those key defining aspects of "what is middle class," we have cut whole swaths of people out.  It may not look like it yet, because a lot of people are managing a so-called middle class existence because they are over-extended on credit and over-leveraged.  We saw the first wave of that falling apart with the foreclosure crisis.  I fear that's just the beginning.

Maybe I'm just in a dark mood today...[/quote]
Same here, but I didn't grow up around this area.  I'm from the Midwest where we would all think DCUMers are rich.  Most of my childhood our HHI was about 40k.  That dropped to 20k once my parents split.  We certainly weren't taking any fancy trips, saving for college, living in million dollar houses, paying for maid service or driving anything above an old econobox hand me down car from grandparents.  I am in complete agreement with you that all these things are upper middle class plus attributes.  I would also argue that people in this area are generally pretty desensitized to what it is truly like to be middle or lower middle class.  Hence the reason why a lot of these threads eventually devolve into a bunch of "real" middle class people coming around and feeling insulted while the upper middle class plus people with the million dollar houses, nannys, BMWs, 529s and millions in retirement savings call themselves middle class.
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